Vengeance: Once More, With Feeling

If you’ve ever read the blog, you might notice that one thing Mel and I agree on is Vengeance. It’s one of the topics that we’ve covered severaltimesbefore. And it’s one that I’d like to touch on again. I know this may come across as beating a dead horse. In fact, that’s putting it mildly – it’s more like exhuming a horse that was beaten to death and taking a sledgehammer to the bones. But there are at least a few good reasons to do that. Err.. talking about Vengeance, I mean. Not exhuming and mutilating horse corpses.

Mists of Pandaria is already in an internal alpha based on the screenshots being used by community managers, so the public beta can’t be too many months away. Now is the time to start hammering on the points that matter – the things that we most want to see changed or fixed. So now is an appropriate time to dig up the issues we care most about and hammer those points home.

Vengeance was designed for a single purpose, which is to make sure tank threat scales as other players improve their gear. Imagine a raid of reasonably geared level-85 characters. In the absence of Vengeance, the tank might generate about 50% of the damage of a DPS character. With the tank’s threat modifiers this should be sufficient for her to generate enough threat to keep her targets stuck to her (unless something unusual is going on in the encounter). The problem is that in later tiers the mages and rogues in the raid accumulate gear that continues to increase their damage, while the tank chooses gear that increases her survivability.

On its own, it seems like a great idea to have our DPS scale with “tanky” stats. Converting stamina to bonus attack power is a perfectly logical way to accomplish that. We do need a mechanism to help us keep up. It’s not the concept of Vengeance that’s flawed, but the implementation. Lets look at the problems with the current version of Vengeance.

Damage Discrepancy in Raids

One of the biggest problems is due to the sheer size of the Vengeance AP contribution. A paladin in full heroic T13 gear will have around 36k attack power, with 19k of that coming from Vengeance. Now, Vengeance needs to grant a lot of AP to be able to have a significant effect on our DPS scaling. But this design ensures that our damage output while tanking is around twice as large as when we aren’t. And make no mistake, we’re not balanced around our damage while soloing quest mobs. They balance our damage under ideal conditions – having a boss smashing our face in – which means our damage in every other aspect of the game sucks. Whether it’s off-tanking, questing, doing dailies, or anything else.

To get a feel for how bad this is, let’s look at some numbers. Raid-buffed Retribution paladins perform roughly at the middle-of-the-pack, around 45k DPS. Protection puts out around 23k, barely half of what a Ret can dish out. And worse yet, these are the best numbers, which include paladins putting on “stunt” gear sets to parse. But even if we take them at face value, that means our DPS without Vengeance is around 12k, or about a quarter of what a DPS spec can do. Doing less than 10k DPS to a mob in solo play is, quite frankly, pathetic. A DPS spec blows through those same mobs at 30-40k DPS in equivalent gear. It’s pitiful, and it doesn’t make any sense. What compelling reason is there to keep tanks doing less than 25% of a pure class’s DPS in solo PvE content?

Interestingly enough, one of the reasons we looked forward to Vengeance was that we were promised we’d be able to do competitive damage, since it wouldn’t be always on (and thus, wouldn’t make us overpowered in PvP). But in fact, our current DPS is in-line with our output in Wrath and BC, before Vengeance existed. So the net effect of Vengeance for tanks has been that we get to keep our relatively poor DPS output in raids, but we lost the ability to do even half of that in the absence of a raid boss.

I don’t think you can make a credible argument that a tank doing 15-20k DPS while off-tanking, soloing mobs, or questing is unbalanced when a DPS spec can pull 2-3x that. They’ve already decided to turn off Vengeance in PvP, alleviating any concern about us doing more damage to other players than our survivability should permit. So why are we made to suffer with a Vengeance implementation that makes for a poor gaming experience outside of one specific situation?

Threat Inconsistency

One of the more frustrating parts of Vengeance is that it’s not there when we need it most: on the pull. One or two “lucky” dodges or parries (or a miss or two thanks to our total disregard for threat stats) can easily lead to a loss of aggro and a tasty melee-DPS snack for the boss. Now, apparently, that’s by design – quoting the developer blog again:

Vengeance is not supposed to solve the threat problem completely. A tank shouldn’t be able to just auto-attack and let Vengeance do the rest. Vengeance isn’t a replacement for the tank generating enough initial threat to get the targets to stick to her. She shouldn’t need to rely on Vengeance in the first six seconds of combat. It’s there to prevent the warlock from slowly creeping up on her threat in the middle of the fight.

Vengeance paired with a 500% threat modifier makes the “DPS creeping up on you” problem nonexistent, that’s for sure. So in that sense, mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, we have a dilemma here. In the absence of Vengeance (i.e. on the pull) we put out 25% of what a DPS spec does. So with a 500% modifier, we should be putting out 125% of their threat, right? Well, no, because that’s 125% of their average threat. That’s great on paper, but back here in the real world, DPS players are going to be pre-potting and popping their cooldowns on the pull, which means they’ll be doing their maximum spike DPS, which can be as much as twice their average DPS.

So we have a problem, because the one point in the fight where we actually need the extra threat, we don’t have it. And it’s a mechanic we have no control over, because it’s limited by the whim of the RNG. Dodge a few attacks on the pull? Unless you have a tricks and misdirect, good luck!

Threat needs to be an important part of the game — I’ll try to explain why we think so in a future blog. However, it isn’t our design intent for threat generation to get much harder in the third tier of content relative to the first

Or, as explained in a later blog post, threat needs to matter. We’ve since been told that threat isn’t an interesting mechanic, and it’s been essentially removed from the game. Steady-state, middle-of-the-fight threat is a complete non-issue anymore, Vengeance or not. But it still matters on the pull, in the one situation we have no control over. If threat isn’t an interesting enough mechanic to matter later into the fight, why must we still struggle with it on the pull?

Or an even better question: Since threat isn’t an interesting mechanic, Vengeance is purely a DPS bonus for getting smashed in the face. Why must that account for 50% of our DPS? Why couldn’t a larger potion of it be baked into our raw damage output? There’s no mathematical reason it can’t, I can assure you of that.

Frustrating Tank Swaps

Perhaps the most annoying “feature” of Vengeance is how frustrating it makes tank swaps. You know exactly what I mean: your co-tank starts the encounter, builds up his Vengeance and a boatload of threat, and then the encounter mandates that you taunt off of him. Except you don’t have any Vengeance, so right after taunting you’re putting out half the DPS he is. You can play some tricks, like holding a SotR and popping wings on the taunt, or timing your taunt against the boss’s swing timer to ensure you take an attack during the fixate duration. But that only does so much, and more often than not if your co-tank doesn’t stop attacking, they’re just going to pull aggro back off of you. Thank the Light for having two taunts right? Oh wait, that’s gone in Mists too!

It’s not until later in the fight, when the two of you have amassed enough threat that the 10% aggro pull threshold isn’t achievable in a 5-10 second window, that this problem goes away. And it’s something that no amount of skill can correct for; if you get unlucky and dodge a few attacks after your taunt, it doesn’t matter how much gear you have, you’re going to cede aggro. The only solution is to arrange for your co-tank to stop attacking after you taunt, which isn’t very fun for either of you.

Reverse Scaling Confusion

One thing that Mel and I both dislike is mechanics that reward you for doing illogical things, or worse yet penalize you for doing otherwise logical things. Vengeance has this problem on a fundamental level because it’s triggered by taking damage, an event that we as tanks go out of our way to avoid. We gear, gem, enchant, use cooldowns, and optimize our play around surviving, which usually means “take less damage.” But by optimizing our character for succeeding in an encounter, we’re rewarded with lower stacks of Vengeance and less DPS. It doesn’t make much sense. As a player, I want to be more badass as I gear up, not less.

This problem still exists in current content, though the updates in 4.3 went a long way toward alleviating it. For the most part, you can treat Vengeance as “always on” for Dragon Soul bosses (when you’re actively tanking). But it’s exacerbated in older content we outgear. Try going back and doing any of the entry-level raids in T11 and you’ll notice that you won’t maintain full stacks of Vengeance – often you’ll hover around 30-50%. Again, as I gear up, I want to feel more badass, not less, and doubly so when I’m trying to go back and blast through content that’s no longer very relevant. Does a DPS spec generate 50% less DPS as soon as they set foot into an instance they out-gear? Of course not. So why should we?

Weak Scaling

Vengeance was supposed to make us naturally scale so that we’d be able to keep up with DPS. We’ve already decided that threat is irrelevant, but we can say that it should ensure our DPS scales the same way a DPS spec does. And in fact, if you take a look at our DPS over the course of the expansion, you might conclude that it’s been working pretty well. That plot seems to show us consistently parsing at ~50% of a DPS spec. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Vengeance isn’t actually scaling fast enough to account for that change. In normal-mode T11 gear, Vengeance gave us around 14k attack power, which added to our innate attack power from gear gave us around 27k total AP. In heroic T13, it’s only 19k out of a total of 36k AP. Our total AP has gone up by around 33%, but DPS has more than doubled – we do 23k now compared to 10k in T11, similarly 45k+ for DPS specs compared to ~20k in T11. Our DPS scales linearly with AP, but not well enough for 33% AP to double our DPS. So how do we explain the data in the plot?

The answer is that we’ve been propped up by other mechanics changes over the course of the expansion. In 4.1, holy power generation was added to Grand Crusader, Avenger’s Shield lost the ability to be blocked, and Judgement became a trigger for Sacred Duty. Those two changes gave us a pretty significant DPS boost, roughly between 1k-2k DPS. In 4.2, we were given two extremely strong set bonuses to play with, as both the ret and prot T12 two-piece bonuses were large DPS increases. In fact, they’re so large – around 1k DPS each – that most of the players parsing in Dragon soul are still wearing either 2xT12 ret or 2xT12 prot (as of the time of this writing, the top 25H Ultraxion parse is from the time when SoT was bugged; every other parse in the top 5 contains either Righteous Flames or Flames of the Faithful or both). So patch 4.2 gave us another 1-2k DPS independently of Vengeance. And in 4.3, we saw a significant buff to Judgement of Truth combined with mechanics changes that improved the uptime of Vengeance (another hint that the ramping mechanism was faulty) and improved scaling of the T12 ret/prot bonuses All told that’s another 1k-2k DPS added to our baseline.

In short, Vengeance hasn’t done its job well enough. Without the jolt of DPS from other sources that we’ve been given each patch, we’d have fallen behind by 3k-6k DPS over the course of the expansion. We’d now be doing 17k-20k to a DPS’s 45k+, or around 40% what they put out. Without the buff to the threat modifier, we would be dangerously close to losing aggro if it were solely up to Vengeance to sustain us. This isn’t a critical flaw, because it’s easy to correct, but it does mean that Blizzard under-shot the scaling on Vengeance during tuning.

Vengeance also isn’t supposed to make you scared to attack a tank in PvP. Tanks have enough benefits in PvP, such as being hard to kill and control, especially in Cataclysm when Rated Battlegrounds provide them with a role where they can defend flags or towers. Players generally don’t hit hard enough to trigger the full effect of Vengeance, unless they are all ganging up on one tank, at which point someone in the group should have the ability to dispel it (Vengeance is treated as an Enrage effect for dispel purposes).

But I have trouble believing that, because the argument doesn’t make sense to me. If the ramping-on-damage-taken mechanic wasn’t for PvP reasons, then I’m not sure why it even exists. It has never served any useful purpose in raiding. I could see that concern if Vengeance gave tanks comparable damage to a pure class, because then you might see raids bringing tanks instead of pure classes (same dps, but more survivable). But it doesn’t and hasn’t, even in T11 when it was at its peak. As long as Blizzard tweaks the numbers such that tanks do 75% or less DPS than a pure spec, the ramping mechanic is completely unnecessary, because no raid is going to bring more tanks to an encounter than absolutely necessary.

The only logical reason for the ramping is to keep us from having the one-two punch of great survivability and strong DPS in a PvP scenario. Balancing the solo PvE game around having survivability is ludicrous. At low levels, everyone’s DPS is so high that people blow through the leveling experience regardless of spec. At high levels (80-85), tank DPS is so pathetic that the survivability benefit isn’t worth the loss. Everyone I know switches to their Ret off-spec if they plan on doing an hour of solo grinding (AoE grinding may be a notable exception here).

The smoking gun is the change that eliminated Vengeance stacking based on PvP damage. It fully decouples Vengeance from the PvP game. If part of the intent of Vengeance wasn’t to limit our PvP DPS before, it certainly is now, because Vengeance now specifically gives us DPS in PvE but not in PvP. I’d argue that it was doing this all along, whether the developers realized it or not.

The only other option is that despite having all the knobs to tweak to keep our DPS output at 50% of those pure classes all expansion, they truly believed that raid leaders would bring extra tanks to an encounter instead of pure DPS specs. And I just can’t fathom that, because I’ve never met a raid leader who would. An encounter is an optimization problem, and raid leaders stress out about the <1k DPS boost you get from flasks and feasts. Why would they voluntarily take a 20k DPS loss? On progression encounters, you rarely have that sort of breathing room.

Solution

Vengeance – Your attacks deal 50% more damage to NPCs. This value increases as you gain more Stamina.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. It’s a simple solution that fixes every single one of the problems with Vengeance without creating any new ones. No more pathetic DPS while soloing or off-tanking. No more taking your pants off on farm content to make sure the boss hits you hard enough to hold aggro. No more giant threat differentials or aggro losses immediately after a taunt. No more concerns about excessive tank DPS in PvP. And it fulfills the stated purpose of Vengeance: our DPS will still scale with a “tanky” stat. You get the same net effect in a more elegant, more intuitive, and just plain better form.

Yes, it introduces an artificial difference between PvE and PvP. But the recent hotfix does that anyway, and the current form of Vengeance isn’t much less artificial than what I’ve proposed. As they learned with Colossus Smash, sometimes the best solution is to recognize that PvE and PvP are different beasts, and adjust accordingly.

You may notice that I’ve left the exact formula vague here. The current version is essentially y=mx, with y being AP and x being stamina. But anyone whose had a high-school algebra class can tell you that the equation of an arbitrary line is y=mx+b. Right now, “b” is implicitly defined by our DPS at the beginning of the expansion, which limits the ability to tune things properly. But it would be ideal to have more flexibility – maybe we get more accurate scaling by granting 50% damage as a baseline and only increasing it for stamina over a certain threshold, like 1% for every 100 stamina in excess of 4000 (mathematically: damage=50%+1%*(Stamina-4000)/100). A system with an explicit way to tweak b without needing to adjust baseline DPS gives you that flexibility.

In the end, I’d rather see the Vengeance mechanic work well, not just in the environment where it matters most (raids), but in every aspect of game play. And it will never do that effectively as long as it’s based on taking damage.

19 Responses to Vengeance: Once More, With Feeling

“As long as Blizzard tweaks the numbers such that tanks do 75% or less DPS than a pure spec, the ramping mechanic is completely unnecessary, because no raid is going to bring more tanks to an encounter than absolutely necessary.”

Not sure this is true. For raid groups with particularly strong DPS in Dragon Soul, I would, without a doubt replace a Frost/Unholy for a Blood to take advantage of the ridiculous 4 piece bonus, 5% max health heal to entire raid every 30 seconds, and a build-up of blood shields that would make the hardest points of the fight utterly trivial. The reason why this is viable is because Blizz tunes encounters so that a group averaging 30k dps would bring down a boss just like a group with 40k average dps would, albeit it would take longer. If tuning was any tighter, even more groups would be locked out of progressing on normal, let alone heroic content.

This is especially true for 25 man guilds, where you have a lot more leeway. If tanks had significant dps output even without getting hit, I am sure groups with above-average dps would bring 4-5 tanks on each encounter, or even more if they could. If the group’s overall damage is enough to down the boss before the berserk timer, they will be replacing dps for tanks up until they are right at the timer, to take advantage of raid walls, OP tank 4-piece bonuses, and reduced damage taken.

You wouldn’t do it if you were close to enrage and that extra 15k-20k DPS mattered, though. The tuning in 25-man DS heroics has been much tighter than you’re making it out to be. We didn’t see many guilds, if any, bringing extra tanks for fights like Ultraxion, Gunship, Yor’Shaj, or Spine.

In addition, you’re hitting on a separate issue. You aren’t talking about bringing the tank for their *personal* survivability, you’re talking about bringing them for an overpowered 4-piece bonus that contributes to *raid* survivability. Which just speaks to how broken the 4-piece bonuses and raid-wide cooldowns in general are in current content. Note that those raid-wide cooldowns are gone in MoP as well, making it a moot point.

I agree with both those points. I am wondering where you think the sweet spot for tank damage is compared to how much a dps is pulling. Obviously, if a tank could do 90% of a dps’ damage, we would be running with 22 tanks and 3 healers.

I would assume the sweet spot is closer to 50-70% or so? I agree with basically every point made in your post; I think my worry is that bringing tanks for just their CDs and damage intake, regardless of whether they actually have to tank anything, is a serious worry. Not to say Blizz won’t ensure this won’t be happening, but can you imagine people going blood/prot, in full dps gear and doing 85-90% of a dps’ damage? If the base number for a tank fully-geared in survival gear (whatever that will mean in MoP) is closer to 50-60% of a dps’ output, making vengeance work like you describe in your post would solve virtually all of its problems.

I would say anywhere between 50%-65% would be reasonable. 75% is certainly pushing the upper limit where you start considering whether the trade-off is worth it. I agree that 80%+ is too high to be balanced. 50% is where we are now, so obviously that’s a “safe” limit, but it’s also a little demoralizing to be such a weak link as far as DPS is concerned.

Theck, I really like this vengeance idea, but I disagree with one point you made. Solo PVE content dps by a pure spec isn’t anywhere near that high because of a few things: Ramp up time, small amount of mob health, and lacking all the synergistic raid buffs. While it may be true to burst down one mob rather quickly, out in the world doing Molten Front dailies, for example, you just can’t get to raid dps numbers when the mob dies by the time you can really get into your rotation. When I’m out ret-ing it up, I often can’t even get a 3 HP templar’s verdict off before the mob’s dead, and inquisition is just out of the question unless I’m chain pulling or get the freebie proc.

I miss the days of doing more damage on boss fights like Brutallus b/c holy shield hit back On that fight alone I could hit 66% of the our dps players’ numbers in real tank gear (not threat gear, it actually went down with that). There’s really no point I’m making here, just something in your post reminded me of it, so I had to write it here where someone would understand it…rather than in this Excel spreadsheet I should be working on.

Keep in mind that:
– many of the raid buffs scale prot and ret similarly, since they’re multiplicative
– Prot has a similar (in fact, an even slower) ramp up time as Ret
So sure, Ret may not be putting out raid-level DPS while soloing, but neither is Prot. We’re both going to be lower than under ideal circumstances, but Ret is still going to do about double or triple what a Prot can. And once you account for Vengeance, it can be even higher.

Consider your own example: things die for you before you can get to 3 HP, which means <9 seconds (<6 seconds if you have T13 2-piece ret). As prot, we generally need two ore more SotR casts, so often 18 or more seconds once dodge/parry are factored in.

I agree with everything said. Its even worse on my warrior vs paladin cause not only do i have no vengeance but i also have terrible rage generation when not tanking, i can’t unload heroic strikes, which my damage is also based around, blizz seems to tune prot warrior dps around an infinite rage scenario (cause that’s what it is, when we’re tanking), so any time we’re off tanking and our vengeance is low, our rage is too and our damage is pitiful. warriors kind of get a repreive and keep some vengeance through vigilence transfer in current model, but in MoP vigilence is being turned into hand of sac (yeah i said wtf too, when i want to be a paladin i play my paladin).

I know on ultraxion i learned i actually needed to trade taunts with MT more often to do more damage. I realized i had terrible parses on ultraxion cause i spent the first 60 seconds not tanking. so i pent 60 seconds of fight beating on boss with almost no rage and no vengeance. Then i thought “wait a minute here, just cause he’s not casting fading light first min of fight doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trade anyways, i need vengeance damnit”. I parsed 6k higher at end of fight from that change alone. If that’s not a good example i don’t know what is In fact, because of vengeance, i randomly taunt things i don’t need to, to take a hit or 2. Healers probably wonder “WTF are these tanks doing?” and we’re thinking “trying not to let the disc priest match/beat my dps”. Yes that did happen to me. a disc priest smiting ultraxion does MORE DPS then a tank with no vengeance and mediocre rage generation, it’s a frigging embarassment. Then it gets reflected on me as if it’s something I’m doing wrong. :

I think a lot of issue in fact stemps to one blizzard model. They balance our damage around optimal only. And optiimal is being kicked in the face, hard. Not avoiding damage, not offtanking, certainly not solo. So vengeance, and even rage, completely fail this design in most sitations and make us terrible. All tanks suffer vengeance, warriors suffer rage as well, bears would too, if they weren’t broken right now (ie they can go kitty and pull like 80-90% dps of a pure dps, in fact, druids are about the only tank right now that don’t suck when they aren’t tanking anything).However, in MoP druids may return to a broken rage mechanic as well and sucking in non tanking moments like rest of us. Although I suppose rage is a topic for another blog :). But vengeance would be a great start to fix.

Taunting randomly just to keep up Vengeance is exactly the sort of ridiculous, backwards behavior that the Vengeance mechanic encourages. And since DPS checks in DS are pretty tight, you almost have to do it to squeeze out that extra 300k-500k damage in the early parts of encounters. Ultraxion and Yor’sahj were great examples of this – in my guild, we taunt after the first melee so that both tanks get Vengeance built up quickly to maximize our damage during Avenging Wrath / Heroism.

And I agree with you about the way they balance tanks. We’re balanced around one specific scenario without any regard for the discrepancy between that scenario and other activities (off-tanking, soloing, etc). And that’s a fundamental limitation of the damage-taken-based Vengeance model.

Honest question (since I’m not that familiar with MoP’s warrior changes yet): Aren’t they moving to a new Rage generation model in MoP? I thought that now you’ll generate Rage with Shield Slam, Devastate, etc. and then burn it with Shield Block? Does that mean they’re also removing rage generation based on damage taken? If so, that might alleviate some of the problems warriors have – as you’re pointing out, they get doubly-screwed by the damage-taken model because it affects Vengeance and Rage generation.

I don’t have a real answer for that yet. Yes they seem to be moving us to a D3 barbarian model sort of. rage generators and rage spenders. I like that model, however i feel it’s going to favor a “once you have threat, forgo using any moves that spend rage to deal damage and only mitigate” sitiation where our damage suck as a result of the change anyways. You can bet we won’t be sitting there using heroic strike to spend excess rage anymore. Unless it’s fresh on the pull and we need to establish a lot of aggro in short time, i imagine this change is going to take rage and fix a flaw we have been waiting years for a fix on, only to have them say “but you can’t use it for damage” anyways. sigh.
I imagine paladins might be put in a similar spot. Hit em with a 3 holy power shield, or mitigation, hmm, no brainer.

So at the very least i hope when we all get in that MoP beta, we can get em to fix vengeance at least! more then ever we’re going to need it, since we won’t be able to compensate with maximized dps rotations anymore. In fact, for us to stay at 50% of a dps in MoP under the resources spent on mitigation model, they’ll probably need to buff vengengance to compensate for that, if they want us to remain in that percentage.

I think the model for paladins, at least, is going to be “HP is all mitigation, all the time.” I would be surprised if SotR did much more than token damage in addition to the block-based mitigation buff it gives. It seems to me like it’s going to be our HP bleed/dump mechanism, much like Heroic Strike is for Rage.

So given that, yeah, hopefully they’ll shift most of our damage into core rotation abilities (CS, Judge, AS for paladins, SS, Devastate, Revenge for warrs). And if not, that’s what blogging is for!

This post was referenced on the game’s official forums. Some productive discussion ensued, but the gist of dissenting opinions is “I’m a rough, tough guy. There’s nothing wrong with Vengeance! Sucka! Wimp!” I’d like to see a substantive rebuttal to your post for the sake of debate, except that its would-be writers reject your premise out of hand.

Do you have a link? I might like to make a bowl of popcorn and read that thread.

I really don’t understand their argument, because I don’t see what being rough or tough has to do with the underlying game mechanics at all. I play and tank successfully despite the flaws in Vengeance too, that doesn’t mean I can’t critically analyze it and notice that there are ways it could be improved. Similarly, you don’t see BM hunters and Frost mages saying their spec is fine because they’re rough and tough and can kick ass despite handicaps.

That said, I’d like to think that the reason they’re limited to “I’m a rough, tough guy” is because there really isn’t a strong rebuttal to be had. It’s hard to imagine anyone claiming that some of the flaws I’ve pointed out are intentional, or that they add depth to the game.

I hope that was ok, Theck. It is something that’s been on my mind often. That my brothers have worked out how to taunt swap with no vengeance without stealing back off each other, that Dellingr made his taunt on pull suggestion as a way around early dps issues – those are things which – like you said – are silly backwards behavior that we use to get around Vengeance. Why should we have to get around Vengeance.

I’d been planning to try to start a thread, but I felt like your post was a lot better than anything I was going to say.

Pretty civil, actually, though I think you’ll see what I mean. Even the most charitable response amounts to, “I don’t care what the design is or isn’t. I’ve learned to cope; so can you.” Based on what you’ve said just now, I was correct in surmising that you think there’s room to suggest improvements and express irritation over how Vengeance actually plays in-game.